Ugly Rinds Last-Minute Gift Guide

Maybe it’s Occupy Wall Street. Maybe it’s the number of people I know out of jobs. Or maybe I’m just developing a thick rind, but I can’t seem to force the holiday cheer this year. Do I need more egg nog? Have I become a morose middle-ager?

Luckily, I can still get excited about cheese, cheese books, and cheese paraphernalia. Here are a few items I picked up in the last year that I just can’t live without.

Marble Cheese Dome

It’s the tea cosy for cheese lovers. The marble base keeps a weepy Brie nice’n cool, and the glass dome keeps flies and fingers away.

Culture Magazine Subscription

This seasonal dairy rag keeps getting better – but I’m biased. Great recipes, cheesemaker profiles, and news for the budding lactophile.

Cheese Knives

So much better than scrambling around for butter knives. 

The Cheese Deck

Max McCalman offers a casino-style approach to the wheeling cheese dealer. Each card features a lovely cheese photo with pairing info on the back. Flash cards?

The Flavor Thesaurus

What a curious gem – I keep this on my nightstand and peruse the wild pairing suggestions whenever I can’t get out of bed. Inevitably, I’m cheered and refreshed.

Mozza

Nancy Silverton (of La Brea Bread) now kneads mozzarella for a living. Well, sort of. This is a brilliant book full of enticing cheese photos– I dream of making her squash blossom pizza.  

Plenty

Hands down most-ogled book in our house. Think Morrocan fusion vegetarian with lots of Greek yogurt drizzled on things.

Tastebuds & Molecules

From the Canadian wine writer François Chartier, a fascinating new approach to wine pairings based on his experiences with Ferran Adrià of El Bulli.

Artisan Bitters

The perfect tonic après cheesing. Put a few drops in sparkling water, and you’ll never need a soda again. Seriously good for digestion.

White Wine Seeks Hunk

My friend “The Monk” bought a very special wine. He wanted to drink it on his birthday and eat a lovely cheese board alongside it. Could I help him? he asked. Bien sur.

Like a Cabbage Patch Doll, this wine came with its own birth certificate – well, practically. I read up on its stats, then wandered down to the cheese shop to pry open the minds of the city's best matchmakers, Hunter Fike and Zeke Ferguson.

“This wine, it’s supposed to have aromas of wild herbs, citrus and exotic fruits," I told them. "And the bouquet should taste of honey, sage, and rosemary.”

“What kind of grape?” Zeke asked me.

I shrugged. “It’s a wine from Novello, called Anas-Cetta,” I told him. “I don’t remember the grape.” (Later, I would discover the grape was called Nascetta, a noble variety, quite rare.)

“Give her Pantaleo,” Hunter said. “It’s the one goat cheese that goes with every white.”

“How about something creamy?” asked Zeke, pointing to a fudgy wudge with an ashy streak.

It’s a duel, I thought. And I asked for a third miscellaneous recommendation in order to have a wild card.

Before The Monk arrived, I let the cheeses relax. In other words, I unwrapped them and set them out under moist cheese cloth for an hour so they would come down to room temperature. Cold cheese is for children.

Corks popped when The Monk arrived. We took preliminary sips on the patio, and our brows furrowed. This was an odd duck of a wine – not the fruit-forward crispy shizzle I’d imagined, but a pickled peach in the glass. It finished off with a buttery lusciousness, but the first impression was definitely tannic. It smelled glorious, like a basket of pears, but the taste, well, there was a hint of kimchi.

What would happen when Wine met Rind? I cringed at the thought.

Then I remembered something I’d learned at a Max McCalman tasting. Double M said that cheese can actually improve the taste of a wine. “Skimp on wine, but splurge on cheese,” was his motto.

Perhaps he was right.

We started with Sofia (Zeke’s pick), a bloomy goat from Indiana that looks a lot like Humboldt Fog, except that it tastes more grassy and acidic. It wasn’t quite salty enough for my taste, but I loved the white-chocolatey chalky moistness. Add a sip of wine, and flinty madness took over. Both the wine and the cheese took on a mineral-y quality that neither possessed alone.

Next, Pantaleo. Hunter was right! Pantaleo’s sweetness and its notes of pine and sea matched the wine beautifully. The pickly prickle I’d initially tasted went away. The wine was, in fact, becoming more and more delicious. To see if the wine was simply improving due to air contact, I glugged a bunch of water and ate some plain bread, then tried the wine by itself again. Pickled peach, all the way. Proof that cheese improves wine.

Finally, Appleby’s Cheshire – my miscellaneous match. This is a well-loved cheese for its craftsmanship, and it’s mellow as bells, which is to say that it’s mild but richly nuanced. I always want to adore it a little more than I do (imagine a muted cheddar…no, imagine a cheddar with laryngitis), but it doesn’t quite have enough muscle for me.

Still, alongside this wine, it was quite lovely, only slightly overpowered.

I called it three for three. Each cheese worked with the wine, and it was remarkable to see how each pairing shifted shapes.  Now, I am curious to try a really low-brow bottle of wine to see if I can raise its profile by serving it with a bombshell beauty of a cheese.

Monsieur Fromage chats up The Monk.

Even the dog turns her nose up. 

The Monk is left to think it over.

Max McCalman: Highlights From A Tasting

If Max McCalman were a cheese, he would be Mimolette – dry, vaguely sour, with a touch of sweetness. He never smiles. He rarely raises a brow or changes his tone of voice, but if you listen carefully you will detect the passionate connoisseur living below the dense crust.

On Monday night, I met Max McCalman, author of Mastering Cheese – a book so fascinating and brilliantly written, I keep it on my nightstand. No other cheese book that I’ve read imparts as much expertise so beautifully. Although it’s designed like a textbook, it reads like a thriller – well, sort of. You have to be the kind of reader who shivers pleasurably at the thought of Pencillium Roqueforti.

Monday’s meeting was a French wine and cheese tasting with McCalman, who is rumored to maintain hundreds of spreadsheets on just such pairings. Since 1997, he has catalogued and ranked every wine-and-cheese combination he’s eaten, uploading favorites to his phone for quick consultation at Picholine. Now he is the figurehead at Artisanal.

All this to say, I trembled within as I rode the train from Philadelphia to New York.

The tasting was held at the French Institute (FIAF). Think berets, women in good shoes. Seven cheeses were arranged in fans at each place setting, along with three wines. Then came score sheets, baguette rounds, and lipsticked smiles.

Here is what we sipped:

Haut-Marin, Sauvignon Colombard, 2009

Oberbergen, Pinot Noir Réserve, 2008

Domaine Bellegarde, Cuvée Thibault, 2004

Here are the cheeses, supplied by Lactalis:

1. Président Saint Maure

2. Le Châtelain Brie

3. Istara Ossau-Iraty

4. Boule d’Or Mimolette

5. Pont de la Pierre Cantal

6. Pochat & Fils Beaufort

7. Société Roquefort

The wines – two white, one red – all shared a fruity quality, verging on too sweet for my taste. And yet, they worked with every cheese! Some combinations were better than others, but it was curious to note how each wine bent and shifted, drawing out different flavors from the seven cheeses.

For example: Beaufort, a complex Alpine cheese similar to Comté, tasted flat with the Sauvignon, flowery against the Pinot Noir, and cheddary astride the Jurancon Cuvée Thibault.

Another surprise: Brie Châtelain + Pinot Noir Réserve = cherry cobbler. I didn’t care for this wine (I kept smelling soy sauce and spare ribs), but the Brie brought out the loveliest cherry notes.

Here are a few other gems from the evening:

• White wines are easier to pair with cheese than reds.
• Scrimp on the wine but splurge on the cheese – it will make the wine taste better.
• Sauvignon Blanc and goat’s milk cheeses “are pals.”
• Eating the caramelized crust of your baguette makes cheese harder to digest.
• If you don’t like the look of blue cheese, think of the mold as “little blue-green flowers.”
• The appetite for cheese in the U.S. has tripled since 1997.

The tasting gave me a new appreciation for wine and cheese pairings – while it’s fun to play around at home, the wisdom of a maitre fromager certainly makes a difference. And now I know a little more about my cheese idol, including what he has for breakfast.

No, not cheese. Espresso with honey. Later, he eats cheese throughout the day -- 2 pounds a week. His cholesterol is perfect.

For more of McCalman's expertise on wine and cheese pairings, check out Artisanal, where he offers information, classes, and more.

Day 4: Blaue Geiss Bliss

Meet Kisha. On Friday, she drove over from Trenton to bring me her new favorite blue. That’s right, uh huh, she is that cool.

Kisha and I are cheese friends -- she comes to tastings, drops me notes on Facebook, and comments on this blog. When she heard I was launching a Blue Cheese Invitational in March, she was one of the first to say, Count me in.

Then she dropped me a line: “Ever tried Blaue Geiss?”

I hadn’t. Now, I am proud of the fact that I eat a lot of blue cheese, and to be honest, I sit can get a little smug about the fact that I have eaten most, if not all, of the realllly good ones.

Carles Roquefort, check

Colston Bassett Stilton, check

Stichelton, check.

Then along came Kisha with her Blaue Geiss. The girl delivered!

“I read about it in Max McCalman’s book, page 300,” Kisha said when she walked in the door. She handed me a cheese wrapped in paper and sat down at the cutting board I had set out on my table.

“Page 300?” I raised a brow.

“Yup,” she grinned. “It’s rare.”

I retrieved Mastering Cheese from my bookshelf and opened it. There it was, right on p. 300: “…this is an amazing cheese, highly atypical and distinct….”

We dug in.

Blaue Geiss tastes like lightly smoked white chocolate with a crank of white pepper. It’s a raw goat blue with a snow-white paste that is pocked with islands of bluing. The texture is clayey; the mouthfeel, densely fudgy – smooth, bright, crisp, achingly balanced. I was blown away.

I should mention that the rind of this cheese looks like a charred marshmallow. Put it in your “fright wig” category of cheeses, but don’t dwell on the surface. Below that craggy black rind: manna.  

Internet sleuthing reveals little: Blaue Geiss is made by Swiss cheesemaker Willi Schmid and aged by the rockstar affineur Rolf Beeler. Seekers on Chowhound give it a mention, but all other references are in German.

Where can you find this little truffle? Kisha foraged it in Princeton, NJ at Bon Appetit. I wonder if the store owner knows that he’s got rapture in his cheese case.

What I Learned About Cheese in 2010

Gloves at a cheese factory in Wisconsin

Earlier this evening, as I was nibbling some Keswick Creamery feta from the back of the fridge, I took a little scroll down memory lane to review all the posts I wrote in 2010. I started with January, when I was not even a year into this blog – and I had to laugh when I saw how tiny the photos were.

I got a little nostalgic, reviewing my year in cheese. So many faces came back into focus – like Debbie Mikulak of Amazing Acres, my first brush with a local cheesemaker. When I sampled her Sea Smoke one evening at Reading Terminal Market, I knew I had to meet her. She co-hosted one of my first tastings, and since then, we’ve teamed up for several more. Debbie is a cheesemaker who is taking Philadelphia by storm. Her Sea Smoke is probably my favorite discovery of the year.

And then I kept scrolling, and Ezekial Ferguson's mug popped up. He was the first cheesemonger to reach out when I first started blogging. When I began receiving his “anonymous” comments – always in lower case, full of gusto – I never imagined I would end up interviewing him formally, as a guest blogger for Di Bruno Bros.

My weekly Di Bruno posts started back in May. By October, I was pulled into the cheese media vortex to attend a cheese tour around Wisconsin. I really never expected to be on a leather-lined bus, snapping photos of jersey cows and meeting some of my favorite cheesemakers on the planet, like Andy Hatch and Mike Gingrinch of Uplands, and George Crave of Crave Bros.

You know how some people are music groupies? I discovered my own little source of fandom when I sat next to George Crave at a dinner in rural Wisconsin, and I kept thinking, “OMG, this is the guy who makes such good mascarpone!” I could hardly concentrate on my cutlet.

So, here’s my little feta-covered revelation: I love the people of the cheese world. Yes, yes, I lovvve cheese, but really, I love the folks I’ve met through this project. They are so much nicer than the rock’n roll crowd I used to know in my former life, as a backup singer.

You think I’m kidding.

I’ve learned this in 2010: I would rather hang out in a make room or at the cheese counter than in a crowded bar. I would rather talk about Max McCalman’s latest book than Sufjan Stevens. I like cheese road trips more than riding in a band van or an ambulance across Europe. I like big wheels of cheese better than amplifiers.

My life is completed by cheese – pull out the hankies now! – and it’s a funny thing to say, but I hope I never get tired of it. I hope I never eat all the cheese there is to eat, because yearning for the next one keeps me going…writing everyday, venturing deeper into the world.

So, what are my hopes for 2011? I want to meet you! Whoever you are, staring at your screen. I hope I run into you at a cheese counter. They are the best places to hang out – the air is full of spores, the mongers are chatty, and behind all those wheels of artisanal goodness is some dedicated man or woman who just wants to make a spectacular snack.

It's kinda like hanging out at the library. Musty, friendly, full of quirky birds.  Good books, good cheese -- it’s all the same juju.